The cambridge companion to british roman 44

j e f f r e y n c ox We can find the growth of a more specifically Romantic canon in works such as Hunt’s often reworked The Feast of the Poets, as it evolves from its 1811 version, where Hunt creates a canon of contemporary popular poets comprising Campbell, Southey, Scott, and, first among equals, Moore, through the key 1815 edition, where he expands his list to include Byron, Coleridge, and, most prominently, Wordsworth, up through the 1860 version, where we find added Hunt’s younger allies Keats, Shelley, and Procter, so that the poem offers an outline of what would come to be known as Romantic poetry Galignani (a Parisian publishing house founded by an Italian who had spent time in London, indicating again that a cosmopolitan world of piracy and translation is important to the dissemination of the pantheon) offered during the 1820s a kind of library of Romanticism with editions of Scott, of Moore, of Crabbe, of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, of Wordsworth, of Southey, of Byron, of Rogers, Campbell, Montgomery, Lamb, and Kirke White, and of Milman, Bowles, Wilson, and “Barry Cornwall.” Hazlitt’s Select British Poets, or New Elegant Extracts from Chaucer to the Present Time with Critical Remarks (1824), created what is the closest thing to a contemporary model of what we think of as Romanticism, though, as Jeffrey Robinson has shown, the collection was reprinted the next year without the living poets, the assumption having been that the suppression of the 1824 volume arose over copyright issues, though Robinson suggests that this “Cockney” anthology “riled some member of the cultural police.”18 Including at first St Clair’s “old canon,” Hazlitt’s striking move is to gather contemporary writers in what Robinson has argued is a “Cockney” construction of Romanticism which “emphasizes poetic and thematic extravagance, poetic eroticism, and left-wing politics” (p 243) For the first time we find Hunt, Charles Lamb, “Barry Cornwall,” Shelley, and Keats appearing alongside their more established contemporaries such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and Scott While Hunt and Hazlitt, important figures in the “writerly nation” that would over time discover a Romantic movement in the period, may have begun to assemble a Romantic canon, it is important that such a gathering, familiar to us, was unusual enough at the time to lead perhaps to the suppression of Hazlitt’s anthology; the “reading nation” was not, apparently, ready for a unified Romanticism From our perspective, the major gap in Hazlitt’s account of contemporary poetry is, as Robinson notes (p 233), that he includes no poems by women, though some other volumes from the period, such as Carey’s, Elizabeth Mant’s Parent’s Poetical Anthology (1814, 1821) and Elizabeth Scott’s Specimens of British Poetry (1823), include significant samplings from women writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries The lines between a masculine canon and a pantheon open to both men and women writers were already being drawn, 22 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008